‘My body shakes even now’: how Grenfell survivors were failed in the days after the tragedy

Maryam Adam said her whole body shakes when she recalls the horror of the Grenfell Tower fire and its immediate aftermath.

She was three months pregnant when she escaped the inferno and stood outside aghast, watching the flames rise up the 24-storey block in west London as her neighbours screamed for help.

In the hours and days that followed, she said she and the community were abandoned and left to fend for themselves. “They treated us really, really badly. The council and the government failed us,” Adam, 48, said through tears. “I didn’t receive any help in the early days from my council.”

Adam, who had experienced miscarriages and a difficult pregnancy, became resigned to sleeping on the floor of her temporary accommodation because the bed was too high for her to get into. She ended up staying at that hotel for five months, alternating between sleeping on a mattress on the floor and a sofa bed while anxious about her pregnancy.

A seven-year public inquiry culminated on Wednesday in a report that laid bare not only the systemic failings in the run-up to the 2017 fire, but also how the survivors were “comprehensively failed” in the aftermath of the blaze.

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It said the emergency response by the government and the local council, the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (RBKC), was “muddled, slow, indecisive and piecemeal”, and that aspects if it demonstrated “a marked lack of respect for human decency and dignity”.

In a 1,700-page report, the panel led by Sir Martin Moore-Bick detailed how survivors were abandoned without information about where to go or what to do, in scenes that were compared to a “horror film” and “war zone”. It said many residents walked in the early hours to community centres that had opened in the absence of support from the authorities.

The report also said that those frantically searching for loved ones experienced feelings of “utter helplessness and despair”. “It rapidly became apparent to them that neither the representatives of the council nor the tenant management organisation were able to provide even the most basic information,” it said.

As a result, it added, the community felt compelled to compile its own list of the missing and piece together its own picture of what had happened.

Adam, who was born in Somalia and raised in Sudan, told how she was one of the first people to escape the fire, which started in her neighbour’s fourth-floor flat, fleeing in just her slippers and pyjamas. She briefly slept in a neighbour’s car before walking to the nearby Clement James Centre, which had opened its doors. She fell ill there and was taken to hospital by ambulance.

“At the hospital they said the baby’s breathing was OK and as soon as I heard that, I left,” she recalled.

She and her husband, Abdulwahab, were desperate to speak to the council before it closed for the day to arrange temporary accommodation, but she did not receive a call back. She ended up going to the council building herself and was eventually given an Oyster card for travel and temporary accommodation in a hotel.

But Adam, who had a slipped disc, said the bed was too high and that the hotel only provided them with breakfast and lunch and did not take into consideration that her husband was observing Ramadan.

Moore-Bick’s report highlighted this failing, saying Muslim residents were not provided with halal food and that it was not possible to observe the requirement to eat at set times.

The council had “no regard for their cultural or religious needs” and people suffered “a significant degree of discrimination in ways that could and would have been prevented if the guidance had been properly followed,” the report said.

“We do not believe that those were isolated incidents limited to a few individuals and families. The evidence suggests that the experiences of those, particularly from Muslim and minority ethnic communities, whose basic needs were not met were symptomatic of a more general, systemic failure on the part of RBKC to think about and plan for those needs in advance,” it added.

In many cases, RBKC failed to provide adequate emergency accommodation, and its allocation was “confused and inconsistent”, the report said. It recounted people being placed in rooms on high floors – despite having fled a burning high-rise block – or areas far from hospitals where relatives were being treated.

In other cases, families of four and five were given one room, while cots were not available for those with babies. It also highlighted Adam’s plight in being forced to sleep on the sofa or floor.

There was also confusion about the provisions available. One survivor, who lost her son in the fire, told the inquiry she did not know that she was entitled to food and so restricted herself to one meal a day. Others had heard that the council would only pay for drinks, so they ordered only drinks.

The arrangements for obtaining food at some hotels made some people “feel like refugees”, the report said. “Survivors described it as living in limbo, with no space to heal.”

There were also significant problems in providing financial assistance to those affected by the fire, and some were even told they were not entitled to support. “Although they did not feel ready to do so, some felt they had to go back to work soon after the fire simply because they could not afford to do otherwise,” the report said.

It added that limited psychological support was available after the fire. Some survivors described how they had struggled with their mental health and desperately needed help but had not known where to get it.

Adam and her husband have now been rehomed in Kensington, where they are raising their six-year-old son, Mohammed. “But when I remember that night, all my body shakes even until now,” she said.

Elizabeth Campbell, the leader of RBKC, said the council apologised unreservedly for its failings, adding: “We fully accept [the inquiry’s] findings, which are a withering critique of a system broken from top to bottom.

“It shows beyond doubt that this council failed the residents of Grenfell Tower and the 72 people, including 18 children, who died.

“We failed to keep people safe before and during the refurbishment and we failed to treat people with humanity and care in the aftermath. We will learn from every single criticism in the report.”